Blogs

Biographer and fellow Oxford graduate A.N. Wilson looks at the man behind The Narnia Chronicles. He follows Lewis’s path from a public school boy that couldn’t hold a bat or kick a ball and was thus doomed to failure to a brilliant scholar, privately tutored, that got a double first (Greek and Latin and the Greats) and almost as an afterthought English. English being treated not very seriously at Oxford, the kind of subject a second-rate kind of...

We have been talking about doing a few aesthetic changes for some time, and with some help from our IT team we are proud to announce the launch of a new face for ABC. The majority of the changes should be in place by the end of the day on November 28th, and some things may be missing in the interim - but we'll have everything back in place by then. The site may also be down for a few hours while changes are being made. If things are missing or...

Capitulation. A long season with nothing much to look forward to. Kaka was easily the best player on the park. The first goal, however, was not a thing of beauty. Celtic are a big physically strong team. Fraser Foster, the goalkeeper, is six-foot-seven. The last keeper that height played for Rangers, Peter McCloy, ‘the Girvan lighthouse’. There was little point playing the ball at anything over head height into the box or he would just catch it...

Okay, where to start? Let’s begin at the end. After the fight. Sometimes to get an idea of how good a fight was you have to look at the faces of the boxers. Froch’s top lip was so badly swollen that he had trouble speaking. His nose was busted and his right eye bruised. His left eye was irritating him. It was puffy, red and angry. It was obvious he could hardly see out of it. He had a bump and a bruise on his forehead that looked as though he’d...

I’m proud to be announcing ABCtales’ Winter Prose and Poetry Competition! The theme is ‘Winter’ — but the thematic is loose and you can incorporate it as much or as little into your work as you’d like. This is a fifty/fifty competition – half of the proceeds will be split between our winners, and half will go to funding ABCtales (which is still bearing the brunt of the cost of our latest redesign!) Rules: The competition is open to all ABCtales...

Dark chatter is what was left after the cosmic big bang. Or dark chatter was what we heard after the banker’s big bang and banks imploded suckering most of us in. Use whatever index you like, make your own lens and look through it. If it is true you’ll consistently find the rich get richer and are rocketing away from the poor with increasing velocity. Focus in on the French city of Angers. Angers showed that mobilisation is possible for those...

The preface on the front cover says ‘My incredible story of survival during the war in the Far East’. In simple sentences the narrative follows the journey of a teenage boy, lucky to have a job during the hungry Thirties, working in a warehouse in Aberdeen. He’s twenty when he’s one of the first drafts of men joining the Gordon Highlanders during The Second World War. His innate fitness and ability also means after basic training he’s also one...

I'm off to Manchester tomorrow to see the fight. Its the biggest grudge match since Benn v Eubanks all those years ago. These two are not playing up to the cameras, they really do loathe each other! On paper Froch wins. Easy, he's the most experienced and has fought the best there is at his weight. But, Groves has the con fidence of an unbeaten fighter. He really thinks he's indestructible. I'll give a full report on Monday. Its on Sky pay per...

The Troubles. 1972. The IRA set off 1800 bombs in Belfast that year. They set up roadblocks to protect Catholics from the tit-for-tat drive-by shootings from Loyalists. The British Government or British Army decided to introduce the counter-insurgency tactics used in Kenya by Brigadiers with hyphenated names. But this was closer to home and it wasn’t blacks that were being shot, albeit it was working class Catholics. Hard working fathers like...

As Graham Greene famously said: ‘There’s always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' This the seed crop of Munro’s stories. It shows her father’s, fathers’ father, a cousin of James Hogg, leaving the Ettrick Valley in Scotland for the wilds of America, which was really Canada. A good author draws you in and puts you on the boat with them. I was all for leaving the Laidlaw family on the boat, but I persevered until...